Article Review: Usability Evaluation on Gamified E-Learning Platforms
Games is always an element that can entertain human and adding enjoyable gaming feature into applications, also known as gamification, is widely adopted and becomes a popular concept in software development which also includes education apps. Gamified education apps aim to get the students engage throughout the learning process and motivate the students to have effective learning phase. It makes usability a critical component in development of the gamified education apps and the usability interaction between the students and system determine not only the success of the apps, it also promote effective learning to the students.
In the article by Issa & Jusoh (2019), they conducted usability evaluation on gamified e-learning platform that focus on learnability and flexibility factors; concluded that gamified features in the e-learning platform provides a positive user experience such as enjoyment and motivational experience in the learning process (Issa & Jusoh, 2019). Observation and questionnaire survey of a focus group formed by 10 undergraduate students with different academic background and gaming experience participated in the usability evaluation on the gamified e-learning platform. The focus group has been requested to fill in a questionnaire survey (see Figure 1) and followed by completing 2 tasks on the gamified e-learning platform.
The methods being used to perform the usability evaluation of the e-learning platform are great; Using focus group in the evaluation of gamified apps able to determine the effectiveness of usability interaction and also gather valuable reviews and feedback from them. Questionnaire survey for the focus group before having them to perform the 2 tasks on the e-learning platform allows the research team to have better justification over the observation while the focus group performing their assigned tasks.
On the other hands, it might be more helpful to the usability evaluation if the team would consider including interview with the focus group. Interview with the focus group formed by the undergraduate students, who eventually will be the end users will review unforeseen usability issues or great usability interactive ideas from the focus group. Furthermore, if the teachers or the professors were part of the focus group, the usability evaluation can achieve greater overall evaluation result as they will be another majority group of users to the system. The more different perspective of the usability evaluation that can be collected from the focus group, the better outcome of the usability interaction design can be built.
References
Issa, L., & Jusoh, S. (2019). Usability evaluation on gamified e-learning platforms. DATA ’19: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Data Science, E-Learning and Information Systems, (pp. 1–6). doi:https://doi.org/10.1145/3368691.3368702
